Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.--Rumi

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Synthesis

Awesome untouched photo by Suzanne!The sun is bursting through the window! Feels good.

I have been bursting to sit down and write!

First of all, thank you again for all of the love and solidarity you express in your comments and email. It is beautiful to hear your expressions of love, and validation of your own experience reflecting mine.

I am sure I've said this before, but it is interesting to have a blog of this nature, recounting the ups and downs of life. Once in a while I go back and read some old posts, and wonder how I got to that place of clarity, and why that place doesn't feel accessible now. Other times I look back and am very glad I'm not stuck there anymore.

I am learning about my linear thinking, and how it expects that as time goes on, my mastery of the process should start to outshine my pathetic struggle for basic survival.

Apparently it doesn't work that way.

If I truly let myself get in tune with defining any learning process underway--if I am honest, what I find completely obliterates (why do I love that word so much?) any concept of linear learning.

Series of cycles are what I find: expansion and contraction, then expansion, then some synthesis of experience--then back to the beginning, for another bit of tempering. Can hurt like hell to be put through the ringer, but somehow it works out in the end. So, if there is linear learning, it is large scale and on a continuum.

Of course, the synthesis of the experience is where you glimpse the jewels forming in the process. Sometimes just facets are revealed giving but a glimmer of hope at the possibility of a really great treasure. In this phase there is realignment and clearer thinking. Often I am shown how truly unopen to new possibility I was. It shows me surprising things, like how I was really moving forward when I thought I was falling down the rabbit hole, and how when I think I've been really rocking it, I've been moving steadily into an ego trap.

I am learning that being open is so much more than the soluble candy words can express. It is a living, breathing posture that embodies the entire physiology, and far transcends any description of words--but nonetheless, words begin the process.

My Synthesis, by Brooke M:

When all else appears to fail, I like to take my A Course in Miracles and flip it to a random page and read. My friends know (and love) this about me. They can't believe how it works like magic. (I can't either). All I know is that when I've given up my every device, and am finally ready to listen--voila.

The other day I was dumbstruck by what I read. And I quote:

Forget the time of terror that has been so long ago corrected and undone...Can it be up to you to see the past and put it in the present? You can not go back. And everything that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you on a mission whose accomplishment can only be unreal...You cannot lose your way because there is no way but His, and nowhere can you go except to Him. Would God allow His Son to lose his way along a road long since a memory of time gone by? This course will teach you only what is now. A dreadful instant in a distant past, now perfectly corrected, is of no concern nor value. Let the dead and gone be peacefully forgotten. Resurrection has come to take its place. And now you are a part of resurrection, not of death. No past illusions have the power to keep you in a place of death.Now you are shifting back and forth between the past and present. Sometimes the past seems real, as if it were the present. Voices from the past are heard and then are doubted. You are like to one who still hallucinates, but lacks conviction in what he perceives. This is the borderland between the worlds, the bridge between the past and present. Here the shadow of the past remains, but still a present light is dimly recognized.Once it is seen the light can never be forgotten. It must draw you from the past in to the present, where you really are. [twilight zone music!--my dream about my daughter]Forgive the past and let it go, for it is gone. You stand no longer on the ground that lies between the worlds...Look gently on your brother, and behold the world in which perception of your hate has been transformed into a world of love.

Okay, so if you can get past the 'God' language of the Course, (which was a no-brainer for me, once I began to grasp the content of what was being said)--

Can I just say OMG!

I decided to go back to basics, and look at the Course workbook. And there was Lesson 7.

I see only the past.And I knew it was true. I can't see anything with fresh eyes. That is my problem. That is my solution.

The lesson gives the example of a cup, and I quote again:

Do you see a cup, or are you merely reviewing your past experiences of picking up a cup, being thirsty, drinking from a cup, feeling the rim of a cup against your lips...are not your aesthetic reactions to the cup, too, based on past experiences? How else would you know whether or not this kind of cup will break if you drop it?Look about you. This is equally true of whatever you look at. [yes, everything that has been causing me pain is because I see it through the lense of a painful past!]Old ideas about time are very difficult to change, [you can say that again!] because everything you believe is rooted in time, and depends on your not learning these new ideas about it.So, okay.

Here I am knowing that if I hadn't been ravaged, I wouldn't even be open to reading this, nor to the possibility that I just don't know, nor could I possibly understand what the hell is going on with anything in this life--and in any other closed space, I am completely vulnerable to a violent part of my mind that would wage war, become raveled up in pain, blame and punishment of others and myself.

No, I choose love, because on some level, I know this is what all of us, should we decide to accept our mission, are being put through the ringer for.

Lest we forget, we will be reminded. As the Course says, Brother, choose again. So hard sometimes.

So, I am left in this feeling space, a little shell-shocked perhaps, by all that has transpired in the year 2010, but frankly, kind of in awe.

So, I guess all there is letting go of the past, and moving forward.

Just lead me, and I'll (do my best to) follow.And meanwhile, I'll see y'all back here in some part of the cycle.

Comments

Thank you for the very lovely comment you left me! You write so beautifully, this post was so nice to read. That photo is so pretty too, I can't believe it has no effects put on it!From Carys of La Ville Inconnue

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